Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools

Course Contents - DAY 1Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

• The tar command
• Compression utilities gzip, bzip2, zip and compress
• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using tar
• Exercises: Compressing files

• Scheduling jobs with the cron command
• Scheduling jobs with the at command
• Exercises: Running background jobs

• Compare two files with the cmp command
• Compare two files with the comm command
• Compare two files with the diff and sdiff commands
• Compare large files with the bdiff command
• Exercises: Identifying file differences

• The split and csplit commands
• Exercises: Splitting files

• od - octal dump
• Use cat to display non-printing characters
• The expand and unexpand commands to convert between tab and space characters
• The tr command for character translation
• Exercises: Translating characters with tr

• Standard regular expressions
• Extended regular expressions

• sed command line syntax
• sed command processing
• Pattern space
• sed addresses
• sed commands
• Hold and get functions
• Advanced flow control
• Exercises: Text processing with sed

• Introduction and command line syntax
• The awk program structure
• Operators
• Simple patterns
• Extended patterns
• Special patterns (BEGIN and END)
• Program variables: Built-in variables, User defined variables, Arrays
• Mathematical operators
• Displaying output with print and printf
• Exercises: Create awk scripts to extract selected data from a file and generate reports

• Program control structures
• The if construct
• The while and do ... while constructs
• The basic for construct
• Associative array handling
• Functions: Mathematical and string functions, The system function, The getline function, User defined functions
• Exercises: Create an awk script using an program control structures and arrays

• Responding to Syntax errors
• Responding to Logical errors

• bc (calculator)
• fuser (testing for files in use)
• getops (checking options passed to shell scripts)
• printf (formatting screen output)
• logger (script logging)
• xargs (generating arguments for a command)
• eval (re-evaluating variables)
• Exercises: Using tools within a shell script